First time visitors to Florence are often amazed to find themselves entirely immersed in a world of art: streets lined with elegant palaces, statues and fountains adorning the public spaces, innumerable museums and churches filled with masterpieces of painting and sculpture.
When you finally pause to catch your breath, one of the questions that inevitably presents itself is: Why here? What was it that led to that unparalleled explosion of creative genius that made Florence the birthplace of the Renaissance? Read on…
Our story begins at the dawn of the fifteenth century. After barely surviving the devastating floods, economic calamity, crop failures and Black Plague of the previous decades, Florence was suddenly confronted by the threat of disaster from yet another quarter. Her political rival, Milan, had grown increasingly powerful under the leadership of the warlord, Giangaleazzo Visconti, and Florence was now being directly confronted by the Milanese imperialist expansion.
One by one, all of Florence's allies came under Milanese control. With the fall of Pisa, Florence lost its access to sea routes and became subject to economic as well as military siege. What to do? In the face of this utter extremity, the guild officials in charge of the ancient Baptistery in the heart of the city decided to hold an open art competition!
Of all the possible responses one might make to the presence of the enemy at the gates, the declaration of an open art competition (the first in recorded history, no less) for an extremely costly set of gilded bronze doors for the Baptistery is certainly one of the strangest imaginable. And yet, of all the different moments one could point to as the beginning of the Renaissance, this is the one that gets my vote.
From among the panels originally submitted by the seven artists who participated in the competition, only the two panels by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi shown below have survived.
It’s significant that the theme that all the artists were asked to illustrate in a single panel was the Biblical story of the Sacrifice of Isaac. This dark tale of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son is one that has haunted the Western imagination for millennia. The moral complexity of the narrative was pondered by Rabbinical commentators in every generation, and Christian artists from the early centuries of the Church already saw the death and resurrection of Christ prefigured in Isaac's redemption.
The background to the story of Isaac, and quite probably to the Florentines' selection of the story of Isaac, has to do with the ritual of sacrifice and its presumed magical efficacy. By invoking through images the archetypal power of the original enactment, the Florentines may have been trying to appropriate this story's power to deliver them from evil. And, strange as it may seem, at the darkest hour the luck of the city indeed suddenly changed. While the art competition was still under way—whether through pure luck or divine intercession—the miracle occurred: the warlord, Giangaleazzo Visconti, unexpectedly dropped dead, his troops lost morale and wandered back to Milan, and Florence was delivered from an evil fate.
Looking at the Panels
The competition panels are currently located in the Bargello Museum on the north wall of the Donatello room, directly below Donatello’s white marble statue of St. George.
When we look at Ghiberti's panel we cannot help but acknowledge the elegance and poise of his exquisitely modeled figures. Yet I think it’s fair to ask whether such harmony and grace are, psychologically speaking, the most appropriate qualities for an image that depicts a father engaged in the slaughter of his child.
In place of Ghiberti's balanced figures, everything in Brunelleschi's image is deliberately and thematically off-balance. Abraham leans forward at nearly a forty-five degree angle, the ram stands awkwardly on three legs, the first servant balances on one leg while the other servant and the ass bend down to drink, the angel lurches forward, and Isaac squats on one knee, his head pushed to the side by his father's hand around his throat. The psychological chaos and raging inner conflicts are mirrored in this bizarre landscape where everything is off-center, in motion, out of balance.
Ghiberti has chosen the moment just prior to rescue. Isaac bravely awaits his fate and Abraham is still intent on slaughter, entirely unaware of the angel who has just appeared. Like Keats’ piping shepherd, Ghiberti's Abraham stands paused, forever ready to kill, as his son is forever ready to be killed. And this static quality in the image leaves us standing just shy of resolution.
Brunelleschi, on the other hand, shows us a world out of balance, but one in which everything is moving. He has chosen to depict the precise moment when Abraham moves to slay his son, when the angel acts to stop him, when Isaac screams out as Abraham lays hold of him. And by daring to imagine and present the very moment of murder and redemption, of terror and pity, it is Brunelleschi's vision which powerfully sets in motion the sudden transformative shift that moves us through trauma to psychological redemption.
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Yet it was Ghiberti's panel, rather than Brunelleschi’s, that was chosen by the judges as the winning entry. The fruit of his victory was a contract to cast twenty-eight additional bronze panels for what were to become the North Doors of the Florence Baptistery, a task which was to occupy him for the next twenty years. Brunelleschi, on the other hand, largely gave up sculpture after the competition and devoted his extraordinary talents primarily to architecture.
There are two conflicting versions of events that have come down to us which describe what took place behind the scenes as the judges tried to decide which sculptor deserved to win the panel competition. One version is provided by Ghiberti himself in his autobiography: he states loudly and clearly that the decision of the judges was unanimous, that the contract was awarded to him exclusively, and that everyone was able to see the obvious superiority of his work. Like Hamlet’s mother protesting her innocence, the excess of hyperbole works against him and tends to undermine our confidence in the veracity of his tale.
Meanwhile, another account of the affair (in an anonymously published life of Brunelleschi probably written by his friend Manetti) suggests that the jury was deeply divided and had offered a joint commission to both men—which Brunelleschi declined. Since Brunelleschi was later saddled with Ghiberti in precisely this way in the project of constructing the cathedral dome (until he figured out how to get rid of him!), Manetti's account seems quite plausible.
But there is another telling detail that further supports the “unofficial version” of the story. Many years later, after Brunelleschi was dead and gone, Ghiberti had another chance to depict the Sacrifice of Isaac on the second set of doors that he made for the Baptistery, the ones that have come to be known as “the Gates of Paradise”. And, guess what? This time around he chose to advance the timing of his story to the very moment of the angel’s intervention—just as in the panel previously created by Brunelleschi.
How else can we read this other than to see it as a tardy admission and acknowledgment that his former rival was the better storyteller?
We know, finally, that at least one other Florentine of power, wealth and discernment also treasured Brunelleschi’s panel above all else and appreciated its profound power. When the de facto ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, was driven into exile by his political rivals, he took the time to perform an interesting gesture just before he left: he placed Brunelleschi’s panel in front of his personal altar in the church of San Lorenzo! In less than three years time, he was able to return safely to Florence and regained the reins of power which he held until the end of his life.
Cosimo’s intriguing choice of Brunelleschi’s panel to place before his altar suggests that he perceived it as a powerful apotropaic image, a magical device intended to ward off evil. And the fact that Cosimo saw the panel in these terms can only be explained by its prior track record. In other words: if this panel helped to prevent the Milanese from capturing the city of Florence, certainly it could help Cosimo avoid the snares of those who were plotting against him.
After the Panel Competition
Whether or not we ourselves believe that images have—or once had—such extraordinary powers, it seems clear that the Florentines believed it to be the case. The magnitude and haste of the effort of the city’s guilds to complete certain artistic projects after the siege suggests a general operative belief in the talismanic power of images to protect the city from harm.
In the course of less than three decades, thirty-four larger-than-life figures of Saints, Prophets, and other Biblical and historical personages appeared on the facades of the buildings which functioned as the religious and civic centers of Florence. It’s during this period of "the march of the statues" that many of the great works by Nanni di Banco, Ghiberti, Donatello and other talented artists that we admire today first appeared.
In the aftermath of their deliverance from the armies of Giangaleazzo, the creative and mythopoeic powers of the Florentines appear to have been liberated to an unprecedented degree. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the panel competition and the salvation of the city heralded an explosion of creativity greater than any the world had seen in at least a thousand years. From the one story of Abraham and Isaac came many stories; but I remain convinced that the deepest wellspring of the Italian Renaissance was the freedom to imagine that was won with the original panel competition for the bronze doors.
